Evenstar, Through the Seasons

My life could be this band. No, really — listening to Evenstar’s Through the Seasons is like remembering what the long-dead band I used to be in sounded like in my head, before the involvement of actual people and instruments. Whichever of you swiped my record collection, you’d better return it right damn now. I’m serious. Well, sort of.

This album’s like a distillation of all the old-school emo I listened to in my post-college youth, back when the term meant something, at least, even if nobody could really agree on what it was. It’s like the guys in Milwaukee’s Evenstar fed copies of the first four or five Emo Diaries comps through a food processor, then melted ’em down into a black, oily-sheen paste, and mainlined the whole mess in one shot of loud, tuneful, punkish rock.

Think Samiam, a less-nasal Camber, early Appleseed Cast, early-early Jimmy Eat World, Brandtson, Mineral, The Get Up Kids, Pop Unknown — all those Deep Elm, Doghouse, Crank! bands I (and maybe you, who knows?) loved back in the day. The best tracks on here — opener “Sixela,” “Full Count,” and closer “Tarantula,” for three — are all blazing guitars, shout-along choruses about pain and time and loss, halfway-audible vocals, and thundering drums — the furious sound of shy boys with broken hearts.

The resemblance to emo bands of yore extends to the production, too; much as I love Jimmy Eat World, when the whole damn rock world shifted to their shiny-clean style of production, I think something raw and real and beautiful got lost in the transition. Evenstar’s regained some measure of it, though, sounding rough and unpolished while remaining melodic and heart-on-sleeve emotive.

There’s not a whole lot new here, of course. At this point reinventing emo is roughly akin to reinventing the microwave — there ain’t a whole lot that can be done to improve, or even change, the way it does what it does. In spite of that, though, Through the Seasons is enjoyable as hell, a nostalgic trip backwards in time to more innocent, idealistic days.